Grays Harbor Paper: “Greenest Paper Mill in the United States”

The story behind Grays Harbor Paper is truly amazing. It reads like that all-American story of a community rallying to overcome great odds, except it gets an update for the green revolution. Grays Harbor is a testament to the validity of the triple-bottom line; in this paper company’s case, that translates to people, paper, planet.

Does everybody remember the spotted owl? Well, in 1991 this creature was officially named a threatened species by the U.S. government, and quickly became a controversial symbol for the environmental movement. That pressed harder on the brakes for an already slow logging industry in Washington State, in whose old-growth forests the spotted owl makes its home.

With forests preserved to protect the bird, logging dried up and a wave of mill closures accelerated. One community hit extremely hard was Hoquiam, a town of about 9,000 located on the Washington coast, where a local pulp and paper mill’s closure left 626 people out of work. Suddenly, unemployment skyrocketed to more than 20 percent, along with suicides and teen pregnancies.

In desperation, the community rallied to come up with some sort of replacement for the paper mill, the city’s largest employer before shutting its doors. That’s when Bill Quigg, his family and a group of more than 40 local residents banded together to buy the mill in 1993. Grays Harbor Paper was born and 250 Hoquiam residents went back to work.

In a market full of big companies and deep pockets, it was initially hard for Grays Harbor Paper to compete. They immediately began looking for ways to cut costs while keeping the best interests of their employees, their town and the local environment in mind. The eventual and ongoing solution was an amazing array of eco-friendly tactics.

For starters, the company looked at all the heat and steam put off by the boiler system, which heats the paper machine rollers that dry paper. Instead of wasting all this energy, Grays Harbor decided to capture and use it to produce its own electricity onsite. They converted the boiler system to burn bio-mass (wood waste in this case), which drives three turbine generators able to produce up to 17 megawatts of electricity (excess energy is metered out to Puget Sound Energy). While burning biomass can contribute to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the Grays Harbor method adds very little, if any, by controlling the burn process and scrubbing the smoke with water.

They also use excess materials—like ash from those boilers, extra calcium carbonate and wood fibers too short to use—and rather than throw it out, truck it to a local farm and use it all to “sweeten” acid soils.

In addition to changing how it makes its paper, Grays Harbor decided to change the paper it made as well—for the greener. They began manufacturing recycled paper containing 100% post-consumer content produced via renewable energy. This is truly the greenest paper on the market. Today, more than half the paper produced in the mill contains recycled content, compared to only 2% five years ago, and 20% of all paper sold is made from 100% post consumer waste.

Furthermore, Grays Harbor sources nearly all of its materials and makes 40% of its sales within a 200-mile radius. Almost all sales are made on the West Coast, from Vancouver to San Diego. The mill’s water is supplied from a rainwater reservoir 15 miles away, and wood pallets are made 12 miles away using only local wood. Bio-mass to run the boilers (and create electricity) is sourced within 30 miles.

Indeed, a recent blog on the Grays Harbor website boasts the incredible “greenness” of GraysHarbor 100, compared to other virgin and recycled papers. Virgin paper produces an average of 5,826 pounds of CO2 per ton of paper. 30% recycled content produces about 5,160 pounds of CO2 per ton. Even 100% recycled content paper creates about 3,605 pounds per ton. These numbers reportedly cover just about every aspect of papermaking, from gas-fired dryers to processing to pulping to paper decomposition and more.

Now check out Grays Harbor Paper’s number, given their onsite renewable energy production and various other green attributes. The Harbor 100 line of paper creates only 650 pounds of CO2 per ton of paper manufactured. That’s more than 80% less than other 100% recycled content papers.

At Grays Harbor Paper, a town and company born like a phoenix out of the ashes of the logging industry, businesses can truly find the greenest paper money can buy. The company sells commercial and business paper, as well as two lines of food, industrial and packaging paper.

And better yet, Grays Harbor is helping other companies in the region follow their lead. They are leaders in Building a Sustainable Grays Harbor, a group comprised of 75 local businesses dedicated to driving a local and sustainable economy. One such partner is Paneltech International, to which Grays Harbor Paper supplies 100% recycled paper—from which Paneltech makes PaperStone, a unique and very promising alternative to wood, marble or synthetic stone (think paper countertops).

Remember that I’ve only covered the paper and planet components of Grays Harbor’s triple bottom line. The union-run company also boasts a very unique, team-oriented, highly inclusive standard of operation, which you can read more about here.

After years of struggle and adversity, being the little local fish in a pond full of corporate whales, Grays Harbor Paper is beginning to come out on top. Governments and corporations are scrambling to prove their environmental responsibility, and Grays Harbor—the town and the company—is there waiting with the perfect paper with which to do so.

The company now boasts revenues around $100 million, roughly 1.5% of the domestic paper market.

The primary source for this paper was WhatTheyThink?

Posted on July 22nd in Sustainable Cities by Dan.